I set out to make a soundboard last night for a tremendous office prank. As a back-end C#/ASP/SQL/Java kinda guy, I don’t have a ton of experience with regular desktop GUI’s and even less with sound manipulation. Armed with 22 various clips of “Scott!” from the Austin Powers movies, I did have the ability to search for components/tools and that search led me here.

I flipped through the FAQ and downloaded the FMOD DLL with the intention of hacking together a small VB6 app to construct the soundboard. Within 3 minutes, max, I had a test harness that loaded a sample into memory and played it. Within another 10, I had code that loaded all the clips into a Dictionary object and keyed them by filename for super-fast playing. This is from a tool I’d never heard of until now.

This is not a testament to my speed as a developer, but more of a sign of the quality of the software. The documentation, sample code, and actual DLL are all produced extremely well.

It may not be a huge breakthrough or integration into a foreign platform, but there’s no mistaking quality when you see it. No big object model, no bucket of COM/.NET/who-knows-what dependencies. Just a good chunk of code obviously written by developers who’ve been around.